Five Questions with Paper Rival

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Jake Rolleston and Brent Coleman talk with CosmoGirl about their album, Dialog — proving that inspiration can come from the most unexpected places.

WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE SONG TO PLAY LIVE?

BRENT: I enjoy playing "Bluebird" a whole lot, and also "Keep Us In" and "Are We Brothers?" I really enjoy playing all the songs.

JAKE: I love playing "Bluebird" too. We're pretty lucky in the sense that we love what we do and we love the songs that we make. We don't feel ashamed. We make the music that we want to hear. We make music for us first, and it's selfish in that way, but we also keep the listener in mind. We structure the songs in a way that makes sense, and people can kind of identify with them, but really, we write what we want to write.

JAKE, YOU BASED THE SONG "THE KETTLE BLACK" ON LOVE LETTERS THAT YOUR GREAT-GRANDPARENTS SENT TO EACH OTHER DURING WORLD WAR II. HOW DID THAT COME ABOUT?

JAKE: When my great-grandmother was getting sick, I lived with her on Lookout Mountain in Georgia, and I was always obsessed with going through the old stuff she had. When she was about to go into a nursing home, I decided to take everything that I thought my family would want. I was going through that stuff trying to get some inspiration, and I saw a few of those letters and just took little pieces of my great-grandfather's writing to her from Germany. It's amazing how the problems that they had in the 1940s are a lot of the same problems that I have now, just dealing with people and being in relationships. I don't know anything about being in a war, but I'm on tour all the time and I miss my family and people that I'm close to. People back home don't necessarily understand why I'm on tour, and my great-grandmother didn't necessarily understand why he was in a war that he didn't need to be in. It's funny how similar the things that I'm told are to what she said to him, like, "When are you coming home? What are you doing? Come home." It transcends 60 or 70 years. I just thought it was a neat idea: Instead of me writing the song, let him write the song. So I took some of his words.

BRENT: The best cities to perform in are the stereotypical ones — New York and L.A. The biggest crowds are where the most people are there to see you and what you do. Not an interesting answer, but it's true. Casper, Wyoming, was awesome too. A ton of kids came out and treated us like royalty.JAKE: We ate peanut butter cream Oreos there — they're so good.

HAVE ANY OF THE BANDS YOU'VE TOURED WITH PLAYED PRANKS ON YOU?

BRENT:TREOS [The Receiving End of Sirens] took our tire off our trailer. It was the biggest show of the tour and we were playing our last song. I looked over to my left and our tire rolled across the stage right toward us...

JAKE: ...and it hit me! We haven't gotten them back yet.

IF YOU WERE ELECTED PRESIDENT, WHAT'S THE FIRST THING YOU WOULD DO?

JAKE: I would take all the money our President gave us for the economic stimulus package and put it in my own pocket — and spend it all on gas, so I could lower gas prices for three days. Then I would buy everyone the first season of Flight of the Conchords on DVD.